Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2023]
- Thread starter BRiT
- Start date
- Status
To be honest, most ray tracing implementations on consoles barely have an impact unless its something like path tracing in Cyberpank or the whole scene is filled with reflective surfaces.
Raytracing implementation is so selective in most cases on consoles that quite often it only serves as a box ticker. Forespoken's RT implementation on shadows for example was pointless. The difference was minimal, barely observable and had zero impact on how pleasing the game looked with or without. Very rare examples of RT implementations shine on consoles.
Without being able to compare a Starfield with and without RT its hard to tell if the performance cost is worth it vs what it does on screen.
Personally I like Starfield's visuals a lot considering the detail it has for a complex open world game.
Firstly:
Secondly, who is talking about art? Their character rendering is worse than some ps4 games, their animations are worse than many ps4 games, the world is not seamless, the performance is not impressive, the correctness of their lighting is questionable as seen below. In the video DF was talking about how they added features like screen space shadows which existed in other games last gen. At best, one could argue that they're playing catchup to last gen devs but to call their output impressive? That's just objectively not true. Impressive in terms of the series x? Absolutely not.
Last edited:
do those PS4 titles with better character rendering also do the other tech Starfield is doing ?
Devs have a fixed budget, they choose what they want to do with it.
It's not because it's a new gen that suddenly they get infinite power.
CP77 has exactly the same characters on PC than on PS4, but the rest of the tech used completely tranforms the end result.
Devs have a fixed budget, they choose what they want to do with it.
It's not because it's a new gen that suddenly they get infinite power.
CP77 has exactly the same characters on PC than on PS4, but the rest of the tech used completely tranforms the end result.
I mean tears of the kingdom runs at 720-900p while docked with framerate drops to 20fps, but that doesn't stop the game being technically impressive with all that physics interaction and increased geometry density (caves, islands).
While I don't really think Starfields showed any impressive graphics tech in the past trailers (and tbh they look like average ps4-gen tech), the sheer scale of the game makes it more impressive than the graphics on top (and the amount of DIY you can do in the game). The graphics are definitely better than No Man Sky, which is still a pretty game and benefits largely from the colorful art style. (I also wouldn't call this a fair comparision given how small the team behind NMS is). Somehow I don't even believe they can do "true" 4k with this amount of geometry density (the terrain details look really good). Wouldn't be upset to learn they might use temporal reconstruction or DRS when released.
Still I don't really know why people are mad about the 30fps thing. I mean c'mon it's BGS. FO4 fps drops to 10s on ps4 (I was laughing at the game's graphics when I found out they still have fake & unrelated cubemaps for object reflections, not even captured at in-game locations). And I don't really think any of their prior games shine on graphics ever after morrowind. If they can maintain a stable 30fps on the console, I'll be the most happy (which I doubt, looks like the fps still tanks in combat from the trailer). I get that XSX is promoted as a performance beast, but BGS is not really known for that.
While I don't really think Starfields showed any impressive graphics tech in the past trailers (and tbh they look like average ps4-gen tech), the sheer scale of the game makes it more impressive than the graphics on top (and the amount of DIY you can do in the game). The graphics are definitely better than No Man Sky, which is still a pretty game and benefits largely from the colorful art style. (I also wouldn't call this a fair comparision given how small the team behind NMS is). Somehow I don't even believe they can do "true" 4k with this amount of geometry density (the terrain details look really good). Wouldn't be upset to learn they might use temporal reconstruction or DRS when released.
Still I don't really know why people are mad about the 30fps thing. I mean c'mon it's BGS. FO4 fps drops to 10s on ps4 (I was laughing at the game's graphics when I found out they still have fake & unrelated cubemaps for object reflections, not even captured at in-game locations). And I don't really think any of their prior games shine on graphics ever after morrowind. If they can maintain a stable 30fps on the console, I'll be the most happy (which I doubt, looks like the fps still tanks in combat from the trailer). I get that XSX is promoted as a performance beast, but BGS is not really known for that.
Last edited:
If you would take the time to look at that picture - which you won't - you would see that there are (at least) two light sources casting shadows. And as I'm sure you're aware, scattering effects can vary based on distance, layers of atmosphere passed through etc etc
What if it's one planet and 2 suns?
Yes in Star citizen there are like 4 planets you can go too right now. With almost nothing on them . You can also explore all of the planets in starfield you just can't fly the spaceship around them.
There are a few planets in star citizen and a thousand in starfield so you are right you can't compared the scope. starfield is much much more. Also Star citizen started development in 2012 and has raised over 589m to date . Starfield in contrast started development in 2015 after fallout released. We are almost at the 11 year anniversary for Star citizen and the game is still years off while Starfield is launching in year 8.
Star citizen has a few bounties out in the single system they have an once in awhile a server event. Starfield like other bethesda rpgs will have hundreds of hours of quests.
Star citizen sells new ships to you for dozens to hundreds to thousands of dollars. Starfield has a huge amount of customization for space ships.
While at some point in the future star citizen may become the game Chris Roberts promised we are 11 years in and I'd wager we have at least another 2 years to go , if not 4 before SQ42 actually releases and much longer until all the promised features are in the PU
All games have these aspects
I mean going through and finding bad looking screen shots is easy. I can go pick almost any game and find them. However both Star Citizen and Starfield have beautiful looking moments also.
One thing to think about is that this is a game that took 8 years to create. This is different than an fps or 3rd person adventure game . This game was figuring out what they could do on hardware 8 years ago which was just 2 years after the last gen consoles launched. It just takes that much longer than something like a God of war or Spiderman. GOW was 2018 and then 2022. It's a lot easier to target in new techology when a game is 4 years in development. Spiderman Released in 2018 , MM 2020 and SM 2 2022. It's a lot easier to stay on top of the latest hardware when you have rolling starts to your games. GOW 1 and Spiderman 1 were designed around ps4 and the respective engines was able to get updated for GOW 2 and SM MM with PS5 in mind. Then they were able to ditch the ps4 and focus just on the ps5 and its tech for SM2.
Now that isn't to say that Spiderman or GOW are bad games. They are just drastically different in scope and thus have drastically different development times and technology needs. I'm not sure if there is a game we can compare at the moment that is similar in scope that is releasing or has released recently. Even stuff like Avowed and Fable wont be the size and scope of this , zelda isn't anywhere near the scope of it either and nor are FF16 or the next one.
It's actually hard to come up with anyone else making something on this scale. I'd say even CD project's games fall far short of this .
Last edited:
Does anyone find a screenshot that shows the game utilizes SSR?
It's kinda weird that so far I can't find a single shot showing SSR (water, glossy metal surface and etc). All the reflections seem to be provided by cubemaps. (I'll exclude that table shot because that looks more like a clear-coating/transparent layer which may not get ssr treatment in many games)
If that's true, then I'm actually a bit disappointed. There's no way a next gen game doesn't have SSR while running 30fps and 1296p internal res...
It's kinda weird that so far I can't find a single shot showing SSR (water, glossy metal surface and etc). All the reflections seem to be provided by cubemaps. (I'll exclude that table shot because that looks more like a clear-coating/transparent layer which may not get ssr treatment in many games)
If that's true, then I'm actually a bit disappointed. There's no way a next gen game doesn't have SSR while running 30fps and 1296p internal res...
Funny story, fallout 4/76 had most of the underlying technology used in starfield running on ps4/xb1. Well except for the for the separate planets which is nothing more than separate levels connected by space which is just an interactive loading screen. It’s not even seamless as well which is frankly sad. Base building was in fallout 4. Starfield has shipbuilding which is literally the same underlying system for base building but modified for ships. Easy code reuse right there. They caught up with ps4/xb1 developers in rendering features and that’s what they did on a machine that’s 8x more powerful than the xb1. What a colossal mismanagement of resources. How anyone could call that impressive is beyond me. Even Eurogamer is running a defence ad for why starfield is 30fps.
Sure we could blindly accept the sentiment that the game is impressive or we could just use our brains to quickly determine that something is amiss. When the xb1 had games like assassins creed unity, Red dead redemption 2, Battlefront 1 & 2, Gears 5, Battlefield 1, etc, should we be impressed by starfields graphics or performance on a machine that’s 8x more powerful? I repeat, 8x more powerful. This is the best you could do? We can’t even make the argument that they’re wasting a lot of the additional performance on 60fps or a ridiculously higher resolution. Frankly, I don’t know how anyone who is thinking about this objectively can deem this technical showing “impressive”.
Again, if we leave our feelings for the game out of it and we should in a technical discussion, this is not remotely impressive.
Wrong. Starfields planets are no where the size of Star citizens planet and we saw that in the showcase. I don’t know that one can argue that Starfields planets are even bigger than no man’s sky’s planets talk-less of Star citizen. It also doesn’t matter if they have more planets since most of them are pea sized in comparison.
All of this is irrelevant to the technical discussion at hand. All I read here is you trying to defend starfield by putting star citizen down while discussing no actual technical features of the game. Again, I’m not saying starfield is a bad game, I’m just saying that it’s not technically impressive.
I can pull out no less than 20 horrible scenes from that showcase and I wouldn’t even be trying. Just the facial animations alone are a huge eyesore.
Firstly, No Man’s sky is bigger in scale and that’s a fact. Secondly, if the game started development 8 years ago, then it should be far more performant than it is. 8 years ago, there were no next gen consoles and the specs had not even been hashed out. If they were targeting last gen consoles initially, they should have been optimizing their systems to make them more performant. So if these are the results of their optimizations, it’s frankly embarrassing.
There is definitely something weird going on. The shadows of the arch cross shadows that are going from the direction of the main lightsource because its shadow casting comes from the "wrong" direction. The environment is lid by the lightsource that is coming by the visible sun. The shadow of the arch, even if there were two suns doesnt seem to take into consideration two suns. Its as if it is affected by one lightsource only
cheapchips
Veteran
I never understand why this keeps cropping up as some sort of issue, not just from you.
Technology just doesn't come into it. Realistically scaled galaxies and planets drives various gameplay choices, as does the 'Newtonian slider' for space combat.
Mass Effect II vs Frontier: Elite 2. Fight!
(Everyone wins, both are compelling games)
Almost everything in Starfield is procedural.
All the games you mention are largely not. The scope and size of Starfield requires most things to be calculated in real-time, you can’t bake 1000s of planets worth of lighting. How do you bake the inside of your ship which you can constantly change
With new modules?
None of those games have the level of object permanence either.
By claiming nothing they’ve done is impressive and that all they could muster here is embarrassing; You’ve done a master class here on how to be dismissive to make your argument work.
Starfield is 125GB. The same size as COD WZ2.0 which is a fraction of the size and scope of what you can see in Starfield.
If Starfield did what COD did, the game
Would likely be several hundred terabytes. Not only is this impossible to do labour wise, but it’s just not feasible for game to be any larger than 125GB.
Facial animations; no facial capture.
All animations have to be procedural, once again, impossible to have all of this baked just due to the scope.
Wow, do you think this is the first space game with procedural generation? You guys keep mentioning things about Starfield while conveniently ignoring no man sky who has done basically everything Starfield has on ps4. It has procedurally generated planets with way more than 1000 planets and the environments, weather, etc are generated real time. All the concerns you raised were already done by NMS.
Procedurally generated facial animation? Horizon 2 does that and does it so much better, it’s not even funny and that runs on ps4. Nothing you’ve mentioned is remotely impressive because the scale at which they’re doing it is smaller than that of a game running on ps4. I’m sorry but, I’m not impressed by things which have been done before and done at a bigger scale on worse hardware. Maybe if they delivered this in a technically competent package and not 1296p at unstable 30fps, I could actually be impressed. Again I’m sorry but nothing this game is doing justifies this level of performance on a machine that is 8x more powerful than its predecessor.
To make matters worse, you tried to shift goal posts to file size? Last I checked, this isn’t a thread discussing file sizes.
Honestly, I wish we had the ability to profile the game so that we can see how they just wasting resources. If there’s one thing that’s a guarantee with Bethesda, it’s that they always inefficiently utilize resources.
Last edited:
davis.anthony
Veteran
Correct me if wrong, but aren't real life planets connected by space?
I'm still rocking a 4790K four cores and 8 threads at 4.5 ghz. I'm perversely quite interested in seeing how Starfield runs on it. Minimum specs are 6 cores, but at lower clocks. Maybe I can scrape though...
I increasingly find SSR to be a double edged sword. Even taking into account its relatively low cost, the occlusion artefacts can lead to some really nasty looking scenes. The battle hub in Street Fighter six has huge shiny floor areas and a large PC walking around. Reflections disappear and reappear below your characters limbs as they animate. It affects a large part of the screen and is very distracting, like your character is dripping white spirit that is erasing detail from existence. Not my video, but these grabs hopefully show what I mean:
And here is the PC walking over an inverted ghost of himself, while the desk infront on its right edge is also nicely breaking SSR:
It's one of those things that my brain can't un-see now, and the SSR ghost haunts my dreams.
Edit: SSR (and the Series S version) aside, SF6 is a nice looking game with a commendable level of scalability. I'm not trying to dunk on the game. Intend to get it at some point.
Last edited:
Does real life use space as a loading screen to generate aspects of the planet? When you get to a planet in real life and you want to enter the atmosphere, do you have to wait for a loading screen? Imagine having a game where you have the vastness of space as a loading screen to procedurally generate all that is required of that planet. Imagine having that and then preventing the player from flying into the planet? Why would you do that? Because it’s not actually a planet but a procedurally generated play space/level. Todd and co have been talking up the scale but I do not believe that we’re seeing scale on the likes of star citizen where the object scales are actually correct.
Take the planet Crusader in star citizen, it has an in game diameter of 15000km and that’s just one planet. If you took the play spaces of all 1000 “planets” in area for starfield, you could probably fit them inside Crusader. Again, when we talk about scale, there are levels. Now I’m not saying that having all this space makes star citizen a better game. I’m saying that from a technical perspective, one is far more complicated than the other. Now tying this back to performance, nothing Starfield is doing justifies its level of performance.
This next comment isn’t directed at you but, I think there are 2 reasons why there’s opposition to this…. The first is people’s excitement for the game is preventing them from objectively assessing the technical package presented by Bethesda and comparing it to existing solutions. The second is that I think some are upset that I pointed out Digital Foundries technical hypocrisy. Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen them pick and choose when to criticize a game for one thing while giving another game a pass for the same thing. It’s just wrong. If you want to criticize, be consistent so that we know where you stand. If you can’t be consistent, just discuss the technical aspects without letting your opinion spill into it. This way, viewers can arrive at their own conclusions without being told what to think.
Last edited:
It's really encouraging to see people who normally spend all day attacking devs depend a 30fps cap, but the arguments being made are a little weird -- I don't really see why starfield can't run at 60fps technically, slapping together some procedurally randomized masks for texture blending on a planet doesn't completely buckle your performace. What we know for sure is that bethesda is a huge team that consistently makes games people love, and has seemingly very little interest in delivering great performance. Do I think their game could run better, in principle, yeah I do! Do I think it would require an overhaul of team culture, changeover of staff, change in priorities, which will undermine what makes the studio work currently? Also yes! This stuff all gets harder the longer a project is and the bigger a game is.
- Status
